[Kde-accessibility] Timeframe for KDE 4

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

Hello,

As you may know I am one of the members of the Technical Working Group 
(TWG). In order to make sure that the decisions made in the TWG are 
acceptable by the HCI related projects I would like to get some overview 
about the planned features and the expected time that is required in order 
to implement them.

I know about the following efforts:

1. Integrate support for screen readers and other assistive technologies 
into KDE (via QAccessible and Qt-SPI)

In order to support assistive technologies in KDE we need to provide 
QAccessible information for all KDE widgets that are not based on Qt 
Widgets or that significantly change purpose of the widget. Implementing 
this information can be done without heavy changes to the API, but it 
requires a lot of work which can start as soon as we have a tool for 
testing the information. Harald Fernengel will provide us with that tool 
as soon as we have DBUS support in KDE.

2. Updated guidelines and widgets for colors, fonts and icons

Olaf, Ellen and I are currently discussing new guidelines for colors, fonts 
and icons (we intend to send them to the HCI list for a discussion 
sometime in the next days). These guidelines will require some changes 
both to kdelibs and to many applications. Implementing the changes in 
kdelibs is not much work (can be done in less than a week), but for 
changing the application we would like to have the help of the individual 
application developers.

3. Implement the usability enhancements shown on 
http://test.openusability.org/wiki_ou/index.php/Libs

4. Changes to KTTSD

For KDE 4 there are a number of changes to the KDE Text-To-Speech system. 
They include:
- Integrating  kttsd, KSayIt, the various kttsd plug-ins for kate / 
katepart / khtmlpart / koffice, and maybe kabook into a consistent user 
interface
- Move KTTSD to SpeechDispatcher.
- Simple speech feedback (focus tracking, mouse-over, etc.) for use with or 
without a magnifier

5. Improving existing KDE Accessibility programs (and possibly including 
some new ones)

Open questions are:
- How much time do we need for implementing the above efforts?
- Who will implement the kdelibs changes for 2.? It can be done by the 
people involved in the kdeaccessibility project, but that will delay other 
important accessibility work.
- Did I forget important HCI-related efforts that need to be considered in 
the release planning for KDE 4?
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